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Support for immigration in Canada has dropped since last year

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The Environics Institute, a Canadian research agency that conducts public opinion surveys and collects data on government, social and economic issues, has released its annual study on Canadian public opinion on immigration.

The report found that over the past year, Canadians have become pessimistic about the direction of the country and the economy. It notes that they have doubts about the government’s ability to plan for future challenges. This includes the perceived challenges posed by immigration. 

The Environics Institute worked in partnership with the Century Initiative, which is a non-partisan organization that aims to implement policies and programs that would increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. 

The study is conducted each year to gauge Canadian opinions on immigration and refugees. It is based on telephone interviews conducted with 2,002 Canadians between September 4 and 17, 2023. A sample of this size drawn from the population produces results accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples. 

Findings

Canada’s population reached a major milestone this year, hitting 40 million people. This is an increase of over one million people in a year. International migration is responsible for 96% of the population increase. Some respondents perceive this to be a contributing factor in Canada’s strained healthcare system and the lack of affordable housing.  

Despite these issues, the report notes that as in past years, very few respondents singled out immigration or refugees as the top problem facing the country. It says a strong majority of Canadians still believe that immigration is beneficial for the economy. 

The report explains that, as relates to immigration, Canadian’s are concerned about the number of immigrants in Canada but not about immigrants themselves. As with the 2022 report, they are more likely to say that newcomers make their communities a better place.  

Environics concludes that Canadians’ recent concerns about immigration’s effect on housing are more a function of media narratives about a housing crisis than local developments or direct experience. 

Too much immigration? 

When asked if there is too much immigration in Canada, 4 out of 10 respondents strongly or somewhat strongly agreed. This is a rise of 17 percentage points over the 2022 numbers. However, looking at it another way, that means 6 in 10 did not feel that way. 

Graph displaying overall support for immigration levels over time.

Support for immigration in Canada is starting to decline.

Still, this is the largest year-over-year change recorded for this question since tracking began in 1977. The most notable change was seen among Ontario respondents where agreement with that statement is now at 50%. 

Comparable results were found in British Columbia, Canadians in top income brackets, first-generation Canadians, and men. 

It was also noted that 64% of homeowners who are worried about the affordability of their home are likely to agree that there is too much immigration in Canada. 

Politics also plays a part in the numbers. The report found that, as in years past, political affiliation has an impact on how Canadians view immigration. For example, 64% of Conservative party supporters believe there is too much immigration (an increase of 21 points over last year) but has risen just 11 points to 29% among liberal supporters and 9 points to 21% for those who support the NDP.  

Graph demonstrating support for immigration based on political party support

How Canadians feel about immigration based on political party support.

Why the change? 

Among those who support the idea that Canada accepts too many immigrants, 38% responded that they have concerns about immigrants affecting the availability and/or affordability of housing. This is 23 points higher than in 2022.  

Some respondents believe that immigrants are a drain on public finances (25%) or bad for the economy and employment (25%). Others are concerned about overpopulation (19%) or believe that immigration is being poorly managed by the government (10%). 

It is notable that in 2022 there were more Canadians who believed that immigration was a threat to Canadian or Quebecois culture, identity, and values (Down to 8% from 16%). Very few were found to believe that immigrants cause security or public health threats, or object to the number of immigrants coming as students to study in Canadian universities and colleges. 

 Support for immigration levels 

When respondents were asked if Canada needs more immigration to increase its population, public opinion was divided evenly between support and disagreement (47% each). 

This represents an 11 percentage point decline in agreement since 2022 and is the first decrease seen since 1993. 

The sharpest decline in support for accepting more immigrants was seen in Ontario and Canadians in the top income bracket (both down 18 points) as well as first-generation Canadians (down 16 points).  

Albertans, Canadians with no post-secondary education, those who live in rural communities, and Conservative party supporters are also less apt to believe that Canada needs more immigrants.  

Immigration and the economy 

Most Canadians feel that immigration is good for Canada’s economy. However, when compared to last year, the numbers show that there is somewhat less belief in immigration’s positive economic impact. 

Graph displaying how many Canadians see immigration as positive for the economy.

Fewer Canadians feel immigration is positive for the economy.

Three-quarters of Canadians strongly (36%) or somewhat agree (38%) that immigration is beneficial for the economy. This represents a drop of 11 points since 2022 and shows that agreement is at its lowest point since 1998. 

As with other sections of the study, support was weakest among supporters of the federal Conservative Party (63%) as well as homeowners who are very worried about housing affordability (59%). 

Immigrants make Canada a better place 

Despite the decline in support for immigration levels, when asked, more than 42% of Canadians responded that immigrants make their community a better place.  

The most positive response came from Atlantic Canada (49%) and British Columbia (51%).  It was also high among Canadians with a university degree and supporters of the federal Liberal and New Democratic parties. 

Supporters said it was because they value immigrants’ contribution to multiculturalism and diversity, in addition to helping the local economy and boosting local population growth.  

Housing affordability in Canada 

The report comes at a time when Canada, along with much of the globe, is experiencing an affordability crisis. This is particularly true for housing. The average price of a home in Canada now exceeds $650,000 according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. 

The results are in contrast to the 2022 report in which nearly 70% of Canadians were found to disagree or strongly disagree when asked if Canada’s immigration levels were too high. It was the most support for immigration recorded since the annual survey began 46 years ago. 

Further, the 2022 Environics report found that just 15% of respondents believed that immigrants were driving up home prices and making them unaffordable for others. 

Environics 2023 says more Canadians are now connecting the housing crisis to immigration, “but very few see this happening on the ground in their own communities”. The institute believes that this reaction stems from the broader issue of a lack of confidence in the economy rather than the increased presence of newcomers in their communities. 

Immigration Levels Plan 2024-2026

Each year, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) releases an Immigration Levels Plan that sets targets for the number of permanent resident admissions into Canada for the coming three years.

The Levels Plan for 2024-2026 is expected to be released on, or by, November 1st.

Canada’s government sets immigration targets so it can plan ahead to ensure that there is sufficient infrastructure in place for newcomers to have the support they need, such as settlement services, housing, and access to healthcare. This is all while balancing the needs of Canada’s current population.

In the 2023-2025 plan, IRCC introduced Canada’s highest-ever immigration targets, going as high as 500,000 new permanent residents each year by the end of 2025.

In August, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told Bloomberg news that he does not anticipate that the targets for 2024-2026 will be lower than they are presently. The minister supports immigration as a key tool in supporting Canada’s economy.

Census data from 2021 found that 23% of Canada’s population is an immigrant and projected that this would rise to 34% by 2041.

 

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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